


Pulp Fiction Heroes

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Injury Recovery, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-22 06:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11961747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound is a slow process, as Jack is finding out the hard way -- and not just physically. But when one of Peggy and Daniel's cases lands them in trouble, it's a convalescing Jack and the Jarvises to the rescue.





	Pulp Fiction Heroes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alessandriana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandriana/gifts).



> Thank you to [sheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) for A+ alpha-reading, cheerleading, plot brainstorming, and handholding!

Even with sunset's colors bleeding out of the night-purple L.A. sky, it was still hot. The breeze from the open window hardly stirred the curtains. Jack had long since lost interest in the mystery novel he was reading (borrowed from Ana Jarvis); it lay open on the bed beside him, while he sprawled in his undershirt in a puddle of sweat, stared at the portrait of Howard Stark leering at him from the wall, and tried to find the energy to move.

His stitches itched and the oppressive heat ( _dry heat, my ass,_ he thought) seemed to be crushing the breath out of him. The last thing he wanted to do was look Peggy in the eye and try to act normal.

However.

The alternative was lying here with Stark grinning lasciviously at him. 

He should have turned that portrait around to face the wall already.

It was, however, a good incentive to get out of bed. Anyway, if he didn't show up eventually, Peggy would probably come looking for him, and that was worse.

He pried himself off the bed, getting up with great care, trying not to cause any of his chest muscles to pull at anything rib-related. As soon as he was sitting up, he was no longer too hot but too cold, even though his shirt was still stuck to him with sweat. Stupid effing convalescence.

He retrieved the gun from under his pillow and stuck it through the waistband of his trousers, then pulled on a sweater, ran a comb through his hair, and glowered at his wan reflection before wobbling down to the Stark pool. 

Here he found Peggy working out with the punching bag and Sousa lounging in a nearby chair, watching her with a drink in hand.

Oh good. An audience.

"Here to heckle?" he asked Daniel testily, leaving the gun on a table where he could snatch it up in case he needed it. Not that gunmen were likely to invade the Stark compound on a quiet Tuesday night, but as he'd learned the hard way, you never knew.

"Appreciating the view," was the casual reply, which got a wry look from Peggy.

"I'm amazed you can see anything except the glare off your shirt," Jack shot back.

Daniel was dressed casually, not that he seemed to have a "formal" setting since he'd gone out west. His shirt of choice tonight had flamingos and palm trees on it. 

"As opposed to the fashion example you're setting," Daniel said dryly, with an appraising look at Jack's invalid-wear -- rumpled trousers and the oversized sweater despite the heat of the evening;.

"If you can't be useful --" Jack began.

"Excuse me, I believe the punching bag is over here," Peggy said tartly, tucking loose strands of sweat-damp hair behind her ears. She looked like she'd been there for awhile, and Jack felt a surge of embarrassment at showing up late, which shifted easily into anger directed mostly at himself. He was sick and goddamn tired of lounging around all the time, and equally sick of his body not doing what he wanted it to do. And the last thing he wanted, in his present mood, was an audience.

Which ... seemed to have translated, somehow, because Sousa was hoisting himself out of the chair, reaching for the crutch. "Try not to damage him too much," he told Peggy.

"Cheeky," she retorted.

They were left alone by the poolside, with the punching bag rotating slowly on its hanger. Peggy smiled at Jack and reached for a glass of water on the table beside Sousa's vacated chair. "I believe I promised to show you a move or two."

Their training (couldn't really call it sparring, not with Jack moving at roughly the speed of an anemic snail) had developed spontaneously, as one part physical therapy and one part game of one-upsmanship ... not that the latter was a game he could win in his present condition. But it beat spending all his time lying flat on his back reading Ana's borrowed novels, drowning in sweat and his own dark thoughts, cursing California, its misbegotten weather, and himself for not staying in New York where he belonged. And by the time he got back to his fighting weight, he'd know most of Peggy's tricks, so at the very least, she wasn't going to land any more cheap shots on him.

He had been showing Peggy boxing moves and boys' schoolyard tricks for fighting dirty -- some of which she knew, some she didn't. And she showed him the moves her SOE instructors had taught her, most of which screamed "black ops" even when she was demonstrating how to deliver a stab wound using a shoe as her "knife".

Considering how aware he'd become lately that this woman could kill him without breaking a sweat, Jack made a conscious effort to let go of his irritation -- something he'd been getting a lot of practice at lately. If nothing else, convalescence was teaching him patience. "If I tear any stitches," he said lightly, "I know a couple of doctors who will be wanting a word with you."

"Hmmm." She picked up his gun, ejected its magazine with practiced hands and removed the bullet he kept chambered, with a slight eyebrow-raise at him. Jack forced himself not to be _too_ bothered, either by her too-acute awareness that he never left himself unarmed anymore or (just as much) by the lack of easily accessible weaponry. Peggy, being Peggy, probably had a gun of her own somewhere nearby, and she wasn't the only person in the house who could handle herself in a fight. Sousa had been sleeping over at the mansion most nights, and while Jack was well aware that _he_ wasn't the main reason (and every resident of the mansion knew in whose room Daniel was spending his nights), it was oddly comforting to know there was another SSR agent nearby in case anything happened.

Peggy set the bullets on the table and raised the unloaded gun to point at him.

The sharp jolt that went through his system was such an abrupt, unwelcome shock that he'd barely had time to experience it before she reversed the gun and held it out to him butt first. "You'll take the role of the attacker," she said, as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't just _felt_ himself go white from the shock of seeing the blank eye of the muzzle trained on his center of mass. "I'm going to show you a disarming move that one of my SOE instructors showed me. ... Jack?"

"Yeah," he said blankly, thinking, _How the hell can I do my job if I can't even --_

But he settled into it readily enough. Peggy didn't give him time to think, taking him through the movements of her disarming method over and over again, pantomiming slowly since she couldn't actually throw him in his present condition. While he knew exactly what she was up to -- cover, play normal -- he also appreciated her businesslike approach. When she put her hands on his gun and told him to take it away from her, he did it without thinking about it, breaking her hold effortlessly.

"And now I believe you had a few things you wanted to show _me,"_ she said, taking a graceful step backward.

He did take the time to reload the gun before leaving it on its table and then walking her through some different boxing-based means of using her stance and balance to set her opponents off guard. She picked things up quickly, much faster than anyone he'd worked with when he was breaking in new agents. And they traded off: for every move he taught her, she showed him something of her own -- and damn, Peggy knew some nasty moves. Wartime intelligence operative training was a far cry from Basic. 

As always, the moves came with explanations that offered tiny, cryptic glimpses of a Peggy he'd never known. "I once used this to incapacitate a Hydra operative who was apprehended in the act of abusing a prisoner," she said matter-of-factly, showing him a between-the-legs kick that left him suspecting he knew what kind of "abuse" she was talking about. Or: "My instructor at the SOE claimed this was an easy over-the-shoulder throw, but when I tried to do it in the field, I nearly had my head blown off. It's too slow unless your opponent is kind enough to stand just so, which I find they rarely are. However, I've modified it accordingly ..."

Little, fascinating windows into Peggy's hidden past.

But all too soon, his head was swimming, spots dancing in front of his eyes. By now Peggy had become acutely attuned to Jack's tells when he was starting to overdo it. "I think I could get off my feet," she said, wiping the back of her hand across her sweat-straggling hair.

Jack was well aware that, if she was sweating, it had to be from the workout she'd been having before he arrived -- it wasn't like he was capable of pushing her to the point of even breathing hard. But he grudgingly appreciated the "out", especially when the alternative was staying on his feet until he passed out. He grunted a noncommittal acknowledgement and sank down in the chair where Daniel had been sitting. Quietly he retrieved the gun from the table, stuck it through his waistband, and twitched the sweater to cover it.

Peggy didn't mention it. She poured water for them both, and made small talk about the latest details of the case she was working on for a few minutes, and then left him alone by the pool, where he stayed until he was stable enough to walk back to his room. 

He closed the door, locked it, and washed down a couple of pain pills with half a glass of bourbon. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and gazed at himself in the mirror, staring with weary anger at his haggard reflection.

After a moment of silent contemplation, he drew his loaded gun and ruthlessly pointed it at himself.

If he couldn't even do this, there was no way in hell he was capable of going back out into the field.

Cold sweat prickled his skin, and he lowered the gun and fumbled it back into its holster with a shaking hand. As the faintness passed, he looked at himself in the mirror with all the contempt that apparition deserved: white as a sheet, blond hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, looking back at himself with hollow, haunted eyes.

This kind of thing never happened to the heroes of the novels he'd been reading, those square-jawed action types. If they got shot, they shrugged it off. They sure weren't still having nightmares about it weeks later.

And yeah, he knew that was fiction, but he also knew there were heroes out there in the world, real heroes. He'd gone into battle beside some of them, even.

He'd just never been cut from that cloth. He had the face for it, but he'd never had the guts for it.

_You should've died on that hotel room floor, if this is how you're gonna be about it._

He drew the gun again. Pointed it at himself.

Over and over.

Sooner or later, it was going to stop feeling like he was going to die when he faced down the tiny night-black hole in the barrel.

He holstered the gun and drew it.

Again.

Again.

 

***

 

Jack still wasn't sure how he got talked into moving into Stark's mansion while he recuperated. He blamed it on the drugs. 

But now that he was actually here, it was kind of ... nice. Not that he'd admit it, but in some ways, it really was. He hadn't lived in close proximity to other people like this since he'd been in the service, and while those weren't exactly _good_ memories, most of them, he did miss the camaraderie. And this was very different, but also weirdly similar. He was starting to get used to running into other people at all hours in various states of undress and general put-together-ness. (The first time he'd run into Peggy making a cup of tea in the kitchen without her makeup on, with her hair pinned flat to her head and a robe wrapped around her, it had really thrown him for a loop. By the fourth or fifth time, it was just another typical morning; he grunted a vague hello, blundered to the coffeepot, and got a cup to take back to his room.)

He tried not to think too much about the future. For the time being, they had decided informally to let Jack be ... well not officially _dead_ , precisely, but under the radar. Sousa was managing both the East and West Coast offices. Let whoever was gunning for Jack think he was in a coma or whatever they wanted to think. Completely out of commission, anyway. Certainly not a threat.

Not really that far off from the truth, Jack thought grimly, when just walking from his bedroom to the poolside tired him out.

Peggy brought back all the files she could find on the Arena Club. As he re-developed the ability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds at a time, Jack traded those idiotic pulp-fiction novels for paperwork, including whatever case files from their current field ops that Peggy and/or Sousa wanted to shove in his direction. He wasn't much use for field work right now, but at the very least he could do some of the gruntwork to free up agents who had a working set of lungs and hadn't had their chests cracked open recently.

It was a weird role reversal, being the one who was grounded, doing support-staff work while the _actual_ agents went out in the field. 

But as much as his injury galled him, it would be worse, far worse, to be stuck on desk-jockey duty even after his injuries healed, because of his brain. He'd known guys like that during the war, guys who were shipped stateside because their nerves couldn't hack it in combat. He'd always felt, somewhere deep down, that they should've been able to pull it together; hell, _everybody_ hated it in the jungle, everybody had to deal with nerves and nightmares -- who did those guys think they were, letting it get to them when the rest of the squad crushed it down without making a big deal about it?

And now here _he_ was, all but sleeping with that damn gun -- practical, he told himself, as long as his still-unknown shooter remained at large. The nightmares were understandable, and anyway, it wasn't like he hadn't had those before; in a way it was a nice change of pace to have a different film reel playing in his head to jolt him awake. 

And the gun in Peggy's hand, pointing at him ... the way it'd turned his guts to water ... 

Hell, who _wouldn't_ react that way, looking down the barrel of a gun? Didn't have to mean anything. It was just a matter of putting on a calm face and learning to bury it, like he'd buried so many other things.

_Burying ugly truths ..._

She'd startled him, was the thing. Like taking any hit, it wouldn't be so bad if he knew it was coming.

Just had to get his body back up to full strength. Had to get through the sleepless, dream-ravaged nights, one by one.

One of those nights, he'd given up on even trying to sleep and wandered into the kitchen around three in the morning to make coffee. The lights were on, but low, and coffee was already perking in Stark's high-tech coffeepot. Jack almost turned around and went back to his room, but he didn't see anybody, so odds were good that Stark was back in the building (he had a tendency to come and go) and was probably down in the lab. Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, started to turn to leave, and only then became aware of Daniel at the table.

"Gah!"

Daniel smiled slightly. "Thought about saying hi, but I didn't want to startle you."

"Yeah, 'cause you didn't end up doing _that_ at all," Jack growled. His heart was still doing back flips. He sat down across from Daniel -- collapsed, rather.

Daniel's amused look turned concerned. "You okay?"

"Oh yeah, peachy, except for you almost giving me a heart attack." He looked down at the table to give himself something to do. There were papers and file folders scattered across it. Jack spun one around with his fingertip. "Charles Morland, huh? Is that old bastard in the Arena Club too?"

"You know him?" Daniel asked, his expression sharpening (Jack noted with relief) from unwanted sympathy into acute interest.

"One of Vernon's old buddies. Come to think of it, I remember he had an estate out on the California coast somewhere."

"Yeah, he's not actually in the Arena Club himself, but Peggy and I think he might be sheltering some of the members. They're all tied together ... but of course I don't have to tell you that."

"Yeah," Jack muttered. He tapped the folder. "I can make some notes about what I remember about the guy -- what business-type pies he has a finger in, which politicos might be the lucky recipients of his envelopes full of cash, that kind of thing."

"That'd be a help," Daniel said. "Thanks."

Jack shrugged. "Not like I have anything else to do, right?"

It came out loaded with bitterness, and a lot more honest than he'd meant, but the words, once out there, couldn't be taken back.

"You know, Jack," Daniel began slowly.

"Don't," Jack snapped. He couldn't handle sympathy, not from Daniel Sousa of all people. At least Peggy had the sense not to dump her own feelings about his situation on him, even if she wanted to.

Daniel hesitated. Then he said, "You asked me, one time, where I got shot. Bastogne. It was Bastogne."

"Good for you," Jack said harshly. He pushed off from the table, swayed a little before he got his feet. The coffee slopped onto his hand, but at least it wasn't hot enough to hurt.

"I'm just saying," Daniel said, his voice level and calm. "You ever wanna talk, I might understand some things that Peggy wouldn't. That's all."

"I'll keep that in mind," Jack said, adding mentally, _For exactly NEVER._

He went back to his room. Sleep remained as elusive as ever, even though his eyes felt gritty and his body was dragged-out tired. So he took a pad of paper to the bed and sat against a stack of pillows, scribbling down his recollections about Vernon's old buddies. He couldn't help thinking it'd be handy to have all of this written down anyway, just in case the bullet earmarked for him caught up tomorrow ...

Ever since the shooting, he'd had the feeling he was living on borrowed time anyway. Like fate had tried to punch his ticket, failed, and now was just waiting for its opportunity.

No point in thinking about the future when he might not have one.

He flipped a page and started a fresh list of Morland's business partners.

He didn't ask himself what Daniel had been doing up at three in the morning. He was pretty sure he already knew -- it wasn't like he thought he was the only person who had nightmares around here -- and talking wouldn't do anything for either of them except bring up memories they both wanted to forget.

 

***

 

Jack didn't pay a whole lot of attention to where Peggy and Daniel went when they left -- he actually kinda tried not to -- but with the Arena Club investigation still a matter of pressing concern, he _did_ notice when they didn't come back at night. Not that he worried or anything; all-night stakeouts came with the job.

Still, even though he didn't ask, Peggy had a tendency to talk about her plans anyway. "Daniel and I plan to stake out the offices of the _Times_ tonight, as it happens to be one of the lynchpin properties in Mortimer Hayes's media empire and we believe an important strategy meeting between the remnants of the Arena Club might be happening, so don't wait up for us," she might say over toast at the breakfast table. 

"Who's waiting up, Marge?" he'd shoot back, while Peggy cast a look at him that might have been considered fond, and -- to Jarvis's scandalized glance -- dipped a scone in her tea.

So having the clock go nine, then ten, with no sign of them _was_ unusual, if Peggy hadn't mentioned anything planned for tonight. Not that he was _wondering_. He knew how things tended to come up unexpectedly in this job, especially with the West Coast SSR as short-staffed as it currently was. If he wanted to know where they were, all he had to do was call the office. Of course, then he'd have to explain _why_ he wanted to know, when nothing was actually wrong at all ...

Plus, there was no point in running the risk that Peggy might think he was waiting up for her, which was of course completely untrue.

He went and read Arena Club files in bed. Light bedtime reading. He kept the window cracked for the nonexistent breeze and not, of course, so he could hear tires crunching in the driveway when they got back.

He was just going to read until he fell asleep.

The sound of voices, not outside but in the living room, jerked him awake out of a light dose. He'd fallen asleep with the files on his chest. Sounded like a man and a woman. So Peggy and Daniel were back. Great. No problem.

Except ... that was definitely the light cadence of Mrs. Jarvis's voice, and she sounded agitated. Jack glanced at the clock. It was after eleven p.m. -- well past the time when all good Jarvises were in bed.

Jack sighed. He pried himself out of bed, wrapped up in a robe and tucked the gun into the pocket, and went down the hall to see what was going on.

The Jarvises appeared to be having a quiet(ish) argument while Mr. Jarvis put a coat on. "You should try the SSR again, Edwin," Ana declared, tugging at his sleeve. She was wearing a robe, as if she'd just gotten up, though her husband was fully dressed. "That is what they are for!"

" _Part_ of the SSR is here," Jack pointed out, making them both jump. He leaned against the doorway, trying to look unaffected and not like he was using it for support. "What's going on?"

What had happened, it turned out, was that Peggy and Daniel had set off the "trouble" alert in one of Stark's cars -- this was the first time Jack knew they had any such thing. "Well, I should say, that's not the original intent of it --" Jarvis began, before Ana smacked him (gently) in the arm.

"Darling! Get to the point!"

... and he'd been unable to raise anyone at the SSR. Not surprising, Jack thought; from Daniel's complaints, his staff was currently stretched so thin (between the purges of Vernon's people and the ongoing corruption investigation on both coasts) that finding anyone to cover the night shift had become difficult.

"Where are they?" Jack asked.

"I'm afraid I have no idea," Jarvis said, clapping a hat onto his head.

Jack sighed. "So where are _you_ going?"

"To the SSR, naturally."

"Which is going to be locked up and dark," Jack pointed out. Recent conversations with both Daniel and Peggy floated up from his subconscious. "Actually, I think I might have an idea of where they are."

Ana delivered another gentle smack to Jarvis's shoulder. "Edwin! I told you, you should wake up Chief Thompson and ask for his advice."

"And right you are as always, my darling."

Jack tried not to roll his eyes too obviously. "Let me get some clothes on."

 

***

 

Jack didn't know the address of Morland's estate off the top of his head, but it was easy enough to locate from the Who's Who directory that Stark kept by the hall phone.

"And you believe they've gone there," Jarvis said, as Jack straightened his tie and took a quick look at himself in the hall mirror. He hadn't been fully dressed in a proper suit since he'd been shot. It was weird to see himself looking like ... well, like himself.

Aside from the fact that he was still deathly pale and had dropped thirty pounds, most of it muscle. Rather than fitting neatly as it once had, the suit hung off his shoulders and gapped awkwardly at the waistline.

"I'm not sure, but it's a place to start. Beats chasing down every former Arena Club member in the greater L.A. area." He still couldn't wear a shoulder holster because of his healing chest, but he'd picked up a spare belt-mounted one of Daniel's from Peggy's room. He tugged his jacket to try to cover the bulge.

"Oh, wonderful, I'm not too late," Ana Jarvis declared, joining them in a dark green walking suit dotted with daisies.

"You are not coming with us!" Jarvis said.

"Yeah," Jack said, "I'm with the butler." 

"I have absolutely no intention of going anywhere near any sort of danger," Ana said.

"Darling, the doctor said you shouldn't run --"

"-- Or running, or even walking swiftly. But I might be useful in case you should need someone to go for help, or drive a getaway car, or anything of that nature."

"Are we bringing the gardener, then?" Jack asked sarcastically. "How about the housemaid?"

"Chief Thompson, I'll ask you to have a civil tongue when addressing my wife!"

"Don't fight," Ana said, putting a hand on Jarvis's arm. "If they are in trouble, the more time we waste arguing here, the more likely they are to get themselves into even worse trouble -- don't you agree?"

Given the people in question, Jack did agree. Unfortunately.

He grabbed a cane from the umbrella stand beside the door on his way out. He absolutely loathed needing something to lean on, but it was a necessity if he ended up having to walk more than half a block.

 

***

 

Jack had expected the Morland estate to be dark and quiet at midnight, but instead it was brightly lit up, with cars parked all along the curving driveway, visible from the street as they cruised slowly past.

"Looks like they're having some kind of party," Jack said, craning from the passenger's seat. "Can you find somewhere to park that we can see them but they can't see us?"

" _Can_ I," Jarvis scoffed dryly. He pulled into a side service entrance of one of the places across the street. 

Through a screen of hedges and ornamental trees, they shared a pair of binoculars and watched well-dressed people flit across the lawn. One of the big, fancy cars pulled out, and Ana leaned suddenly from the backseat. "Edwin, Edwin, look! Isn't that Mr. Stark's Bentley, right there behind where that green car was parked?"

"I do believe it is the Bentley, yes," Jarvis murmured, after a moment's study through the binoculars.

"Let me guess," Jack said with a sigh. "That's the one Carter and Sousa took this morning."

"I regret to say that it is."

"We must rescue them!" Ana declared from the backseat.

"We don't even know they're in trouble!" God save him from civilians on field missions. "Look, you both have _got_ to know by now that Carter running off on some ill-considered, hare-brained plan is just a thing that happens, right?" He paused to see if anyone was going to disagree. No one did. "So what probably happened is they got a lead, and they're checking out the party, and now we can leave."

"Except for the distress signal," Ana pointed out. Spoilsport.

"So, to be clear," Jarvis said, "Miss Carter and Chief Sousa arrived at this party, have been there for an indeterminate amount of time, and the party is still going on, there are no screams, and nothing is on fire. And they are still in there. Somewhere."

"Well, she does have Sousa with her to keep an eye on things," Jack said testily.

He looked out at the brightly lit mansion and sighed.

"Okay, look, these people know me. Or at least they know my father and Vernon. I'll walk around and see if I can figure out what Peggy's up to and whether she's managed to get caught or not."

"Excuse me for being forward," Jarvis began.

"Yes, you have a real problem with that, I've noticed."

There was a choking sound from the backseat. Jarvis coughed and started over. "It's my understanding that you are currently feigning your death. Won't this, as they say, let the cat out of the bag?"

"Why does everyone think that?" Jack demanded, trying to ignore the sharp, hot sensation that went through his chest, licking fire along his bones. "No, I'm not pretending to be dead. At least not _formally._ I'm just not really going out of my way to advertise that I'm _not_ dead."

"And you intend to stroll about aimlessly and hope to encounter Miss Carter and Chief Sousa."

"Well, if anyone has a better idea," Jack said darkly.

"I could go in the back entrance and pretend to be a maid," Ana declared cheerfully.

Jarvis and Jack exchanged a horrified look. At least they shared their opinion of _that_ particular idea.

"How about you two stay here," Jack said. He hadn't really thought about what he _was_ going to do with them; he kept forgetting that he had two civilians to be responsible for.

"You'll stroll down the street and up the drive, then?" Jarvis inquired. "Perhaps it is common to arrive at fancy dress balls after hiking half a mile on foot, in the circles in which you are accustomed to move, but --"

"Are you just going to shoot down all my plans? Look, fine, you can drive me in; if I'm the sort of person who turns up at one of these parties, I ought to have a driver. Mrs. Jarvis -- uh --" What _was_ he going to do with Ana? "We can let you out here, and you can wait for --"

"Absolutely not!" Jarvis exclaimed, scandalized. "I'm not abandoning my wife at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood!"

"You'd rather take her into a party full of the movers and shakers of high-class organized crime, would you?"

"Er ..."

"Look, look!" Ana interrupted, waving a binocular-laden hand between the two front seats. "What is happening back there?"

From their vantage point, looking out on the estate at an angle, they could not only see the sweeping front drive, but the service entrance at the side, of a similar design to the hedge-lined service drive they'd parked on. Most of these places seemed to have something similar, a small drive discreetly tucked among hedges and trees, so that the upper-crust types wouldn't have their view spoiled by the sight of a delivery van or a laundry truck.

Like the one they'd parked on, the Morlands' service drive wrapped around the side of the mansion to a gate (currently open; there must be people coming and going because of the party) and a service door. Right now, there was a minor flurry of activity going on back there, around a couple of parked, dark-colored cars.

Jack snatched the binoculars and clapped them to his eyes. At first he wasn't sure what he was looking at, sweeping the binoculars across the tuxedo-clad men carrying something long and dark between them -- a rolled up rug or carpet, maybe? Then the pictured clicked into place with a long, sharp drop in his gut: that dark thing, sagging in the middle, was a human body. He'd certainly seen enough of them in the war. It was too far away to tell if it was male or female, or if it was someone he knew, but as the goons dumped it into the trunk, he glimpsed the sweep of dark hair, longer than a man's.

The body vanished from sight and the lead goon slammed the trunk lid.

Jack's breathing seemed to have stopped completely. He jerked the binoculars and swept them by accident across a white-haired figure by the car. Moving them back, he recognized Charles Morland.

Wonderful.

Jack lowered the binoculars and wet his dry lips with the tip of his tongue.

"Chief Thompson," Jarvis began, his voice strained; all traces of their earlier argument were (if only temporarily) abandoned.

"I saw them put something else in the trunk of the other car," Ana said, very softly. "Was that --"

"Yeah. I think we found our missing SSR agents."

The sound of a slamming car door came to them from across the street. Jack put the binoculars to his eyes again, just in time to glimpse Morland's white hair in the passenger's seat of the car with the body (not Peggy, please not Peggy) in the trunk. The car's headlights came on and it started to turn around in preparation for pulling out of the drive.

"Chief Thompson," Jarvis said quietly. "What do we do?"

What else could he say?

"Follow that car, Jarvis."

The butler said nothing, merely waited until the second of the two cars had pulled out of the drive, and swung in behind them.

 

***

 

What they really needed to do, Jack thought grimly, was stop and call for backup. Not that he knew who he could call, if Jarvis hadn't been able to raise anyone at the SSR. But they were doing exactly what he'd always complained about with Peggy: running off without backup, without telling anyone where they were going, and without even the tiniest fragment of a plan for what he was going to do when he got there.

It was goddamn _contagious._

He refused to think about the possibility that he was pursuing a car containing Peggy and Daniel's bodies. That was ... no. Peggy was knocked out, or feigning unconsciousness. She was going to burst out of that trunk whenever they got where they were going and kick someone's ass, because that was what Peggy did.

Jarvis turned out to be surprisingly good at running a tail. Jack tried murmuring a couple of suggestions ("slow down, let them go through this light") which were met with poker-faced silence, and eventually just let Jarvis take the lead. 

"Do you think they are alive?" Ana asked in a quiet, scared voice from the backseat. "They _are_ alive, are they not?"

Jarvis didn't answer.

"Charles Morland is there, in that lead car," Jack said. "I saw him. And I don't think a guy like Morland would be involved in dumping bod -- in disposing of --" No suitably euphemistic terms presented themselves. After a brief, awkward silence, he went on, "I assume he's taking them somewhere other than the mansion to interrogate them. Which makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't want to do it with a party going on downstairs, either."

"That makes a good deal of sense," Ana said.

 _Yeah, doesn't it?_ Jack thought. And he could just about convince himself it was true, if he worked on it.

Though it _did_ actually make sense. Morland wasn't the type of guy to get his hands dirty. He was like Vernon ... always getting someone else to do the heavy lifting and take the fall if things went wrong.

Jack's lip curled, thinking of that conversation with Vernon back in New York, a couple of months ago. _I want to be down in the muck,_ he'd said, and Vernon had smiled -- because what he'd heard had been the sound of a big fat fish who'd taken the bait. Jack had thought he was impressing Vernon with his can-do spirit, when all he'd been doing was playing into Vernon's hands, offering himself as a nice useful lackey who could be conveniently discarded when he wasn't useful anymore.

 _Yeah, and how'd that work out for you, Vernon?_ If bitterness and anger still twisted his gut at having been played, at being stupid enough to allow himself to be played, then at least he had the cold satisfaction of knowing Vernon's schemes and back-room deals had ended even worse for him than they had for Jack.

He was expecting their pursuit of Morland to lead them to someplace dark and remote (a semi-abandoned warehouse by the docks, an old factory, a rural estate) so it came as a surprise when the two cars pulled into a quiet residential neighborhood. Both cars pulled into a side drive alongside a two nondescript, medium-sized house. Jarvis overshot it, pulled around the block, and rolled slowly to a parking space down the street, with the headlights off.

Jack already had the binoculars clamped to his eyes. The lighting was too poor to make out details, but he saw some kind of scuffle going on behind one of the cars, which ended in one of the scufflees getting pistol-whipped ( _Ow_ ) and dragged off behind the house.

Well, at least one of them was still alive.

A moment later, lights started going on in the house: first upstairs, then in the living room. Through the binoculars, Jack saw Morland and a blonde-haired woman in a red robe having a fight in pantomime, before the woman stomped over and drew the curtains, cutting off his view.

Jack lowered the binoculars and barked a harsh laugh.

"I hardly see what there is to laugh about," Jarvis said tightly.

"I think this is his mistress's place. That old idiot took a pair of SSR hostages to his mistress's house. Well, I guess it's one place no one would think to look. The rest of his properties are probably under SSR investigation."

"We are staging a rescue now, correct?" Ana asked eagerly.

"Against a half dozen armed men on a street full of potential civilian targets, with another civilian in the house? No, _we_ are not," Jack said. " _I_ am going over there to stall while you two find a phone and call the SSR."

"Where no one is answering the phones," Jarvis said.

Crap. He'd forgotten about that. If no one was on duty at the SSR, where could he send them for backup? _His_ department was on the other side of the continent, and every agent he knew by name in Daniel's office was either a fresh hire or currently in jail.

"... Agent Roberts," he decided. "If you still can't raise anyone at the SSR, call Rose Roberts. And stop looking at me like that. I know Peggy's got her contact information back at the house. She's always done a capable job of running the switchboard and, from what I've seen, the front desk of the West Coast office. At the very least she ought to know which of Sousa's remaining agents is competent enough to run a rescue op without shooting himself in the foot."

"I don't like the idea of abandoning Miss Carter and Chief Sousa," Jarvis said testily.

" _I'm_ here," Jack couldn't help pointing out.

"Not to question your ability to conduct a rescue mission, Chief Thompson, but you were shot less than a month ago."

"We do not like abandoning you either," Ana said, with tact, although Jack got the feeling from the look on Jarvis's face that abandoning _him_ wasn't particularly high on Jarvis's list of concerns.

"You were shot a month ago, too," he pointed out to her, and saw Jarvis's expression change. "Look, right now you two are the only ones who know where we are. So go get help and come back, okay? That's the best thing you can do for Peggy right now."

"You can depend on us, Chief Thompson," Ana declared firmly.

Yeah ... he wished he believed that. Oh well. He leaned forward to look at himself in the rear-view mirror, to the extent that he could see anything in the poor light, and smoothed down his hair with one hand. "How do I look?"

"Would you prefer honesty or tact?" Jarvis said.

"Never mind." Anyway, he'd spent enough time looking at his haggard face in the mirror to know exactly what they were going to see. If he'd _planned_ on talking to anyone tonight, he might have filched Peggy's makeup case and spent a little time trying to hide the bags under his eyes. Oh well, most likely the lighting wouldn't be very good and no one would be paying too much attention anyway. "Mrs. Jarvis, do you see a cane back there anywhere?"

After a moment, a hand appeared from between the back seats, gripping the cane he'd picked up at Stark's.

"Thanks." Jack opened the door before he could change his mind. He tried to look like he was stepping out of the car with deliberation and care, and not trying to make his body move normally when every instinct wanted to stay hunched over to avoid tweaking his healing chest. He glanced around to make sure no one seemed to be watching, and then strolled casually down the street.

Behind him, the car's engine purred to life. Still with the lights off, it executed a careful turn; he saw the lights flick on as it turned the corner.

They'd actually followed instructions, for once.

And now he was alone, with absolutely no ability to run, fight, or do anything else useful except talk. Luckily talking was something he was good at.

He touched the comforting weight of his gun under his jacket, and tried to ignore the squeezing pressure in his chest. At least he had the cane to lean on.

The way he saw it, there were two ways he could play this. He could go in as an SSR agent and try to get them to believe he wasn't the only one around, long enough to drop their guns, anyway. He might have tried it if there hadn't been so many unknowns. He didn't know where Peggy and Daniel were in the house, or what their condition was like, whether they'd be capable of fighting or running.

So that left him with what he grimly dubbed his "Vernon's Little Helper" persona. All he had to do was talk Morland into not killing Peggy and Daniel (or himself, for that matter) for a couple of hours, which was probably how long, at a minimum, that it would take the Jarvises to find some agents and round up some kind of rescue.

He had to knock and ring the doorbell several times before there was the sound of rapid footsteps inside. Jack tensed, his hand drifting toward his gun. He wasn't sure if he was going to get a faceful of angry mistress or hired muscle.

It turned out to be the better of the possible options: the mistress. She was a younger woman by Morland's standards, though still older than Jack, about forty or so with bottle-blonde hair pinned up in tight curls for the night. Behind her, Jack glimpsed much nicer furnishings than a modest house like this ought to contain. Charles Morland was keeping her in style.

"Yes, what?" she snapped.

Jack smiled, intentionally somewhere between charming and sleazy. "Ma'am, I'm here to see Charles Morland."

"I don't know anyone by that name," she said, too quickly.

"No? I'd appreciate it if you'd go in there and tell him his old buddy John Thompson's son is here, and Vernon Masters sent me."

She gave him a narrow, suspicious look and started to close the door. Jack thrust a foot into the door, followed by the cane. Hmmm, it was useful for something. He might start carrying one around on a regular basis.

"I'm warning you," she began.

"What are you going to do, call the police?" Jack asked. Her face went stiff. "May I come in?"

"Yes, why not," she snapped, in a tone which seemed to be trying to suggest that it was her own idea, and stepped out of the way with poor grace so he could enter the hallway. She made no offer of hospitality or a place to sit, merely crossed her arms over the red robe.

"John Thompson and Vernon Masters," Jack reminded her, with a winning smile. "If Charles doesn't want to see me, I'll just get outta your hair."

With another scowl at him, she hurried off. Jack felt kinda sorry for her; based on his experience with Vernon, she'd probably had no idea what she was getting into. Just thought she had herself a rich old man on the hook, and now here she was with a couple of hostages in her basement or back room or wherever they were. 

He went on quickly into the living room. He could hear voices elsewhere in the house, but he wasn't sure where they were coming from. Upstairs, maybe? The house was bigger than it looked from outside. He glanced at the pretty little phone on an ornate stand by the wall. Unplugging it didn't seem like a bad idea, since she'd left him alone. If anyone tried to use it while he was still playing Happy Helper, it could always be passed off as an accident, someone jerking the cord loose. He started to move in that direction.

"Who the hell are you?"

Jack flinched, and quietly kicked himself for poor situational awareness as one of Morland's tuxedo-clad goons stepped out of the kitchen into the living room. He hadn't drawn his gun yet, probably not wanting to cause an incident he was going to have to explain to his boss.

_Now let's use that silver tongue to make sure things stay that way, why don't we?_

Jack swung the cane carelessly from one hand, trying to make it look like a classy affectation and not a necessity. "I'm a friend of Morland's and that's all you need to know. Why else would I be here? Is he paying you to think? Get back in there and guard the door or whatever you were doing."

A trickle of sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. He hoped it was just nervousness making his knees feel weak, and not a return of the fever and general exhaustion that had been plaguing him since he left the hospital. He tried not to let his eyes drift in the direction of the slight bulge under the goon's jacket. 

_Breathe. Steady and slow._

A door in the back opened suddenly, and Morland himself stepped through. Jack jerked his eyes away from Morland's thug and slapped a grin on his face. Morland didn't return his smile; he looked darkly suspicious. 

"Charles," Jack said, holding out a hand, smile firmly in place. "Jack Thompson. Don't know if you remember me."

Morland gave his hand a cool glance, and then his face. "Alma says you forced your way inside. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't call the police."

"I'll give you two," Jack said. "They're in the basement, I'd guess, or in an upstairs bedroom." He glimpsed the goon make a movement out of the corner of his eye, and went on quickly, "I'm here on behalf of Vernon Masters, not as an SSR agent. Do you see me flashing a badge around? Come on, man. Let's talk this through like civilized men."

There was a long, tense moment of hesitation -- at least the guns hadn't come out yet -- before Morland gave Jack a very tight smile. "John's boy Jackie. Of course I remember." He gripped Jack's hand in a punishingly firm shake. Jack tried not to grimace, especially when Morland's vigorous pumping tweaked his ribs. "Can't say I was expecting to have you turn up here, son. You know it's the middle of the night, right?"

"Is it?" Jack said with a glib laugh. "Everything interesting in this town happens after dark, sir."

"You said you're here on behalf of Masters, are you? You're in touch with him, then?"

Jack leaned closer, and with a quick sideways flick of his eyes at the goon, "Is this _really_ a conversation you want to have in front of the help?"

Morland gave him another of those small, tight smiles. "Bruno, go keep an eye on the cars, please."

"Yeah, boss," Bruno said after a long, suspicious look at Jack. He turned and went back into the kitchen.

"Drink?" Morland asked.

"Sure," Jack said easily, trying to beat down the worry drumming a steady tattoo inside his brain. He hadn't heard any gunshots or screams. Peggy and Daniel were presumably still as okay as they had been when they were hauled into the house, for whatever that was worth. 

Actually, being in a residential neighborhood was going to work in his favor there. Morland wouldn't want to cause a ruckus that'd result in someone calling the cops. Even if the Tinseltown cops were notoriously easy to pay off, it'd still be a hassle, and Morland might have the bad luck to get the one straight cop on the force.

Morland poured a couple fingers of bourbon and handed him the glass. "So what is our mutual friend doing these days?"

"What everyone else is doing, I expect," Jack said, swirling the drink before taking a sip. "Staying out of sight. Leaning on powerful friends. Waiting for our day to come around again."

"And _you're_ still with the SSR." There was a note of danger in Morland's tone. "I've been hearing some interesting things about you, son. _Very_ interesting things."

"The one about the actress in the cab is a total fabrication, I assure you."

Morland didn't laugh.

"Look," Jack said. "The SSR is a stepping stone, that's all. A smart man goes which way the wind is blowing, and we're both smart men, aren't we? Yeah, I've been playing it low-key and doing some internal housecleaning at the SSR. Sweeping out the deadweight, let's say. It's not the real loyalists I'm cleaning out, it's the ones who are too stupid to know how to keep their mouths shut. Anyway, it doesn't matter what happens at the SSR; it's gonna be gone in the next budget cycle. The important thing is playing my cards right so I come out of it looking like the guy who got the corruption cleaned up and move on to the next big thing." He took another sip of whiskey before he added, "The two you've got, Vernon and I have had our eye on for a while. Now those two I'd _love_ to get out of the way."

"I'm not entirely sure what you mean," Morland said.

"Oh come on, you think I'm here at one in the morning for my health?" Jack grinned briefly. "What'd you do, catch them snooping somewhere they shouldn't have been? You think they got there by accident? Damn it, man, I've been trying to get those two to slip up for weeks. I just didn't expect _this_ would be the trap they got caught in."

Morland's eyes narrowed. "The SSR is investigating me. You're responsible for that?"

Oops. "No, that's all Sousa and Carter's doing. I've simply been doing what I can to feed them a mix of half-truths to keep them stumbling around, off balance. Why the hell do you think I'm still in L.A. rather than hopping on the next plane back to New York?" Jack made a show of checking his watch. "Vernon's on his way over --"

"Masters is coming _here?_ To Alma's?"

Jack smiled and thought, _Don't like that, do you? Well,_ you're _the one who wanted to drag your mistress into the middle of all this._ "He wants to have a little word with those two himself. I hope they're still in shape to talk."

"We hadn't really gotten started when you interrupted us," Morland said, and Jack tried not to wilt in relief.

Actually, he was struggling not to wilt in general. He really, really needed to sit down, but he didn't dare.

"Well?" he said, gesturing with the glass of booze.

"Well, what?"

"Well, where are they? Show me."

This was a Vernon trick, too. Keep things moving fast, keep them off guard, don't give them a chance to do too much thinking.

He was slightly amazed that it worked. Morland set his drink aside. "One rule," he said. "No guns in the house."

"Your guys are carrying," Jack said.

"My guys aren't guests. You'll get it back when you leave. Bruno?"

Jack took the gun out from under his jacket and handed it over to Bruno, trying not to clench his jaw visibly. It felt like having something vital ripped away. However, they didn't search him, which meant they didn't take the penknife in his pocket (not that he was going to be able to do much with a knife with a three-inch blade) or attempt to confiscate the cane.

Leaving Bruno to return to the kitchen, Morland took Jack through a door in the back. This turned out to lead to a screened-in back porch where Alma was sitting and smoking a cigarette. She turned her face away when Morland came out. Jack had a feeling that, even if Morland made it through tonight without being arrested, things were probably over between the industrialist and his mistress. 

There was a large, nicely landscaped backyard and a big outbuilding behind the house. Jack had no idea what it was for; it was too big to be a garden shed. An old carriage house or stable, maybe, made over into a garage? Whatever it was, there was no doubt what it was being used for now, given the goon guarding the vehicle-wide double doors.

Well, that and storage, as became obvious when Morland swung one of the double door sopen. No way you could fit a vehicle in all this clutter. Probably a lot of this stuff was the original furniture from the house, Jack thought, moved out here when Alma's sugar daddy bought her a newer, nicer living room set.

In a cleared space in front of the doors, a pair of sturdy-looking, white-painted metal lawn chairs had been brought out of the mess (Jack could see their siblings and a matching table poking over the edge of a dust-covered couch) and Peggy and Daniel were tied to them. Two more guys guarded them.

Neither of them looked in great shape, but they were definitely both alive. The entire side of Peggy's face was a mass of blood, and her eye on that side was almost swollen shut; her head hung to the side. Jack had to suppress a sympathetic wince; they'd really clouted her a good one. To all intents and purposes, she looked unconscious, but he could see that she was peeking at the world from under the lowered lashes of her good eye.

Sousa's crutch was nowhere in sight, and they'd taken off his leg -- assholes. He, too, looked like he'd taken a few good hits, judging from the bruising on his face and the splatter of blood down the front of his shirt. At the sight of Jack, he sucked in his breath, not nearly as good at keeping a poker face as Peggy was.

"Yeah, not what you were expecting to see, huh, Chief Sousa?" Jack asked nastily. "Figure I still owe you a few things, after our little bit of fun in the desert awhile back."

Which was about the closest he could get to passing a message ( _you get what I'm doing here, right? just follow my lead)_ , but he saw the tightness in Daniel's jaw ease up somewhat, as Daniel's narrow-eyed stare took in the fact that Jack was untied and didn't have any guns pointed at him.

"And I see Carter's here too." Jack resisted the urge to poke her with his cane. He didn't want to ham it up too much; that'd be a good way to get them all shot. Anyway, he needed the cane for leaning on -- a lot more than he wanted to let on to Morland. "Gang's all here. Just like old times."

"I see _you_ picked a side," Daniel said, slurring slightly through swollen lips. He started to say something else and stopped himself. Jack thought that Daniel, too, was trying to figure out how much acting he could get away with before it got to be too much. Peggy'd had the right idea, playing dead.

"Oh come on, you knew all along what side I was on," Jack said dismissively. "You just didn't want to believe it."

Peggy looked, for an instant, like she was pressing her lips together to avoid smiling.

Jack took a casual step to the side and found a nice patch of wall to slouch against. "So that's two in here and two more guys in the house?" he said to Morland, and caught a quick flicker of interest under Peggy's half-closed eyelids. He liked it when they were on the same page. "That's not much security."

"In case you hadn't noticed, they aren't going anywhere," Morland said. 

Jack started to shrug, discovered that it was a bad idea, but went ahead with it since he couldn't exactly stop in the middle. There was sweat trickling down his back again, his skin prickling with ice, and he felt dangerously lightheaded. The drink had been a bad idea; it'd knocked the pain down some, but it'd also hit him like a ton of bricks.

"May as well pick up where we left off." Morland nodded at the prisoners, his cool eyes fixed on Jack. "Want to do the honors?"

"I suggest waiting on Vernon," Jack said. "I know he's got some specific questions for these two. He's not gonna be happy if we soften 'em up too much first."

"From what I understand, that kind of thing is your specialty."

 _Oh, you_ have _done your homework,_ Jack thought, trying to keep the dislike out of his face as he returned Morland's cold stare. _And you're suspicious of me, but not suspicious enough to call me on it, just in case I really do have Vernon at my back. But the longer I stall, the more suspicious you're gonna get, right?_

Which meant it was time to calculate the odds.

Two guys in here, Jack thought, one just outside the door (who'd definitely be inside at the first hint of a commotion) and one in the house. And Morland, though Jack didn't think he'd be much of a threat. Jack supposed it'd be possible to slam the door and shut the others out, at least for the amount of time that it'd take to get these two guys down and take their guns. The odds really weren't that bad ...

... if he'd been healthy. As it was, his boxing sessions with Peggy had shown him that he couldn't even throw a punch with any force behind it.

Hmmm. But Peggy had shown him some moves too. Nothing that was going to be easy in his present condition, but while nearly everything Jack knew about fighting was geared towards guys in his own weight class, Peggy had learned to fight in a situation where she could expect to be shorter and, often, less physically powerful than most of the people she was going up against. Not that Peggy wasn't a powerhouse in her own right. But where Jack's combat skills had always been geared towards overwhelming his opponent with force (a physical impossibility for him right now) Peggy's way of fighting was focused mainly on throws and sneak attacks and improvised weapons. And also being generally sneaky.

Commando stuff.

Well, he had a cane and a knife in his pocket. No sense lamenting over the gun he wished he had. If wishes were horses and all that.

He leaned the cane against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets, and -- with a small intake of breath that he hoped wasn't too noticeable -- sauntered over to Peggy in what he hoped was a decent approximation of his usual nonchalant stroll. He closed his left hand over the folded-up pocket knife as he stood looking down at her. The bruises on her face looked even worse up close.

"This is what you call leaving them in good shape for Vernon, is it? This one doesn't look like she can take much more."

"She nearly broke Harry's kneecap at the car," Morland said dryly. "She's tougher than she looks."

Jack cut a sideways look at one of the two guards, who was standing a little funny, come to think of it, with most of his weight on his left leg. Another advantage to go on their vanishingly tiny list. "A dame? I'll believe it when I see it." He leaned forward from the waist, bending as little as possible, and with his right hand, delivered a light slap to Peggy's cheek and hoped like hell she wasn't gonna take this out of him _too_ bad at their next sparring session. "Hey, sugar. You in there?"

Peggy let her head loll.

"Uh-huh. That's what I thought. You got any cold water around here? That's how we bring 'em 'round, back at the SSR."

"You leave her alone," Daniel said.

"Don't worry, pretty boy, it'll be your turn next."

Funny how easy it was to slip back into this ... well, not a guise really, more like a skin he thought he'd discarded. Dooley's attack dog. There had been a time when he'd feared it was all he was good for. And he still wasn't entirely sure that he'd been wrong, not when he couldn't help noticing the ease with which the old habits came flooding back. He'd been good at this.

_You're a good man, Jack._

"You got her tied good, right? I don't want her popping her ropes when I start going to town on her."

"My boys know their business, Thompson," Morland said.

"Don't you touch her," Daniel snapped.

"I said can it, Sousa." Jack gave one of Peggy's arms a tug, and then, trying to brace himself for how much this was going to hurt, went down on one knee. He took his left hand out of his pocket for the first time, fingers curled loosely around the knife -- it was all about speed really, not giving them time to think or look closely. He curled the topmost two fingers over Peggy's bonds and felt _her_ fingers uncurl, her hand opening so he could slip the knife into her palm.

With one hand resting on top of the chair back, he was able to use that to get back to his feet, but _hell_ , that hurt. He stood for a moment with most of his weight resting on the back of the chair, head hanging down, looking down at Peggy through a red haze as his shadow fell over her. She cracked open her eye briefly, looking up at him, and whatever she saw made her eye narrow.

"Hey!" Daniel said. "Leave her alone! I'm the chief of the damn SSR! You want to question anybody, I'm the one you want to talk to!" 

There was a loud thump from the chair he was tied to. Jack saw another quickly suppressed smile from Peggy, and this time he returned it, just a tight press of his lips.

Daniel was giving them a distraction: Peggy to cut herself loose, Jack to get himself together.

There was a sickening smack of flesh on flesh, and Jack turned around, breathing through the stitch in his side, as Morland's thug -- a big brute, with a lumpy nose that looked like it'd been broken in the past -- drew back his fist to hit Daniel again.

"You want us to question you first, Sousa? All right," Jack snapped. "Get away from him. That one's mine."

He went to retrieve the cane without waiting to see if he'd be obeyed -- _Just keep moving, let THEM try to keep up_. Gripping the head of the cane, he spun around (too fast, head rush, _damn_ ) ... at least he had the cane to keep himself from falling over.

As he gripped its eagle-shaped head and waited for good ol' Lumpy (after a glance at Morland) to move out of the way, he felt something in the cane's head go click.

.... click?

He'd grabbed it from the umbrella stand at Stark's place.

Stark being Stark, it probably wasn't just a cane.

Sword? No, it wasn't heavy enough. Which left a world of possibilities. Jack ran his fingertips over the silver head and found two small catches, one on each side.

"So far I'm not terribly impressed with the storied Thompson interrogation method," Morland said.

"Is that right?" Jack limped over to Daniel. "Wait'll I get going. See, the thing is, me and Danny-boy here have a history. And I can tell you, I'm looking forward like you would not believe to -- this!"

He spun around, pointed the cane at Lumpy Nose, and squeezed both sides of the handle.

He wasn't sure what he expected (he was hoping for bullets) but a jet of fire six feet long definitely was not it.

However, they weren't expecting it either. Especially the guy it was aimed at.

Lumpy fell back with a yelp, his tuxedo jacket on fire.

Peggy sprang from her chair and slammed into the other one, the guy with the bad knee, knocking him to the floor.

Jack reeled backward, holding up the cane like a gun. It felt noticeably lighter now, almost flimsy. He wondered hazily if it had more than one shot in it. His chest felt like he was breathing fire, and spots danced in front of his eyes. He knew he needed to untie Daniel, but he could accomplish maybe one thing at a time right now, and once he got down to floor level, he didn't think he was getting up again.

"Bruno! Teddy!" Morland yelled. "Get in here!"

Jack pointed the cane at him and depressed the side studs, but all it did was send up a greasy puff of smoke. Apparently one shot was all it had. Not too far away, Peggy had disposed of Bad Knee and was now on top of Lumpy, who had been in the act of tearing off his flaming jacket and was now getting his head bashed repeatedly into the floor. 

"Jack, the door!" Daniel yelled.

Jack stumbled, turned around, and found himself face-to-face with the guy who had been guarding the door -- Teddy, apparently -- holding a gun trained on his center mass.

And he froze.

Froze just like when Peggy had pointed one at him.

Someone was saying something to him, but it was nothing more than a dull murmur in his ears. The tiny black pinpoint of the gun's muzzle expanded to swallow the world.

And then something collided with him, knocking him down, just as the gun went off. There was a startled yelp -- Jack didn't think it was him, because he was in a tangle on the floor, unable to breathe and in too much pain to think.

It took him a moment to realize that the floor wasn't as hard as it should have been. And it was moving. And ... he'd fallen on top of Daniel, who had collided with him, chair and all, and knocked his legs out from under him.

"Get _off,"_ Daniel choked out, his voice strained.

Jack managed to unkink himself enough to get his hands on the floor and push himself painfully to something like a sitting position. There was blood smeared all over his shirt. After a first horrified instant, he realized that it probably wasn't his own, at least not most of it, because it was mainly on his hands, and his hands had been on --

"Sousa?" he managed, with what little air he had in his lungs. "Did you just get _shot_?"

"Kill them!" Morland was shouting, but somehow they didn't seem to have died yet. Jack forced himself to look up.

Teddy was standing in the doorway like a statue, unmoving, and then the gun fell from his fingers and clattered to the floor.

"That's right," a female voice said cheerfully, and as Teddy took a jerky step into the room, Jack could see Rose behind him, with a gun shoved against the back of his skull. "This is the SSR, and you're under arrest."

 

***

 

Their main stroke of luck in all of this (possibly their only stroke of luck) was that Rose, as it happened, lived less than five minutes from Alma's house. On top of that, she was going steady with one of Daniel's other agents, and had been entertaining him at home when Jarvis called. They'd both jumped in a car and headed over.

("Rose has a boyfriend?" Daniel said blankly, some time later.

"I cannot believe you didn't know that. She works for you!" Peggy said. "They _both_ work for you."

"I wouldn't ask Rose about her personal life, Peg! It's not appropriate! I don't know if Samberly's dating anybody either ... though I doubt it."

" _I_ knew she had a boyfriend," Jack couldn't resist adding smugly, not mentioning it was because he'd just happened to run into them while leaving the West Coast office late at night on account of Vernon.)

Daniel had been winged; the bullet had punched through the meaty part of his arm, missing the bone. He was still in a hell of a lot of pain. Between that, Peggy's concussion, and Jack (from the feel of things) having done something or other to his stitches, they'd all three ended up in the hospital for a few hours.

Jack's memories of this were somewhat hazy. He'd been increasingly out of it, having run right up against the limits of his convalescing strength, his shirt sodden with Daniel's blood and growing amounts of his own. He vaguely remembered Peggy being extremely testy and Jarvis driving all of them back to the Stark place. He'd tottered off to his room and didn't remember anything else until he woke, with a flinch, to find Ana Jarvis in his room.

He stared at her. She stared back at him, in the act of placing a package of gauze on his nightstand.

"Hi," Jack croaked at last. Pale yellow stripes patterned the wall, sunlight stroking through the blinds.

"Hello," Ana said, smiling. "I apologize for intruding. Miss Carter sent me to make sure you were not dead."

"Why would I be dead?" He gazed at the wall blearily, realizing the light was actually not sunlight but the Stark mansion yard lights (which he'd become all too familiar with, through too many sleepless nights), and then touched his rebandaged chest under the tangled blankets. "Uh ... how long have I been asleep?"

"About sixteen hours."

"Oh," he said after a minute.

"If you wish to get up, there is food in the kitchen," Ana said. "I have left you supplies for changing your bandages." And with that, she saw herself out, closing the door firmly behind her.

Jack thought about going back to sleep; he seemed to have slept himself into a state of dazed somnolence where any sort of movement seemed exhausting and not worth the bother. He turned his head and gazed wearily at the neat little kit of medical supplies Ana had left next to the open mystery novel with its dog-eared pages and square-jawed, blond hero on the cover.

Jack turned the book upside down so he wouldn't have to stare at it (or have it staring at him, accusingly, cataloguing his failings) and pried himself out of bed. He was thirsty and he needed to pee. In the bathroom, he drank two glasses of water, took a pain pill, and then changed the dressings on his restitched, rebandaged surgical scars.

By that point he was tired again, but also hungry. Hoping everyone else was asleep, he pulled on a sweater and wandered down the hall.

No such luck. The lights were on, and Peggy and Daniel were at the kitchen table, sharing cups of tea or coffee, and what looked like pieces of coffee cake.

Just the two people he wanted to see: the ones who'd watched him freeze up and have to be rescued by having his legs knocked out from under him by a guy tied to a chair. Stellar field work, Chief Thompson, put yourself in for a commendation ...

"Jack," Peggy said, and damn, they'd seen him. Too late to flee. Anyway, he was hungry. "There's plenty of food. Come on in."

"So I heard." At least the Jarvises didn't seem to be around at the moment. Small favors. He shuffled over to the buffet spread out on the kitchen counter, and collected some items onto a plate.

He thought about taking it back to his room, but they'd already moved over to make room for him, so, reluctantly, he limped over and sat down.

Peggy's bruises were even more spectacular after they'd had a day or so to blossom. She looked like she'd been on the losing end of a championship heavyweight match.

"I know," Peggy said, seeing him looking. "It's quite something, isn't it? Rather a good thing I haven't any speaking engagements in the near future."

Daniel's arm was bulky with bandages and he was eating with his left hand; Jack tried not to stare too much. Daniel also had his leg back. Jack didn't ask. Presumably it, and the crutch, had been around Morland's place somewhere.

Daniel aimed a kick at Jack's ankle with his good leg. "Stop looking like that. We _won._ Morland got caught red-handed trying to do away with three SSR agents. He's had it."

"Yep, a win," Jack said, picking at his food.

Peggy and Daniel exchanged a look.

"How are you doing, Jack?" Peggy asked gently.

Jack snorted. "Since I'm the only one who didn't get shot or beaten up in that fun little soirée, I'd say better than you two."

"That's not what I meant."

He could lie, could hide, but ... he'd spent too much of his life taking the coward's way out. Even if it seemed his habits were still those of a coward.

"I froze up," Jack said quietly. "Went out in the field and I froze. Just like Belarus."

Daniel gave them both a quick, sharp look. "Belarus?"

Peggy shook her head at him, and to Jack, she said, " And do you remember what I told you then? Everybody freezes. _Everybody._ What matters is what you do after."

"What, let Sousa take a bullet for me?" Jack asked, refusing to be coddled.

Daniel gave a short laugh. "Fine, next time I'll let you get shot, if you'd rather."

"Jack." Peggy's hand settled over the back of his, making him look up. "You walked into a very dangerous situation, while still quite unwell, to get us out of it. And you did. You _did,_ Jack. You saved our lives."

"Technically Rose saved all of us," Jack grumbled. "And the two of you came out with a few dents."

"Remember you're talking to a woman who got herself impaled on a piece of rebar while stealing nuclear weapons," Daniel said.

That jolted him partway out of his gloom. "Wait, she what now?"

"Uh ... forgot you didn't know about that. Never mind."

"I knew about the nuclear weapons. Or at least I was pretty sure it was you." He looked at Peggy suspiciously. "Impaled _where?"_

Peggy cleared her throat, raised her gaze innocently ceilingward, and lifted the tail of her blouse to flash a glimpse of the puckered pink-white scar on her lower abdomen before she let it fall again.

"Good Lord," Jack said. "When did -- wait, does that mean the entire time --" He paused, looking at her with new appreciation. "I thought you were limping a little at Stark's when I tried to get you to go back to New York with me."

"Yeah, that'd be why we had Underwood running around Chadwick's party instead of Peggy," Daniel said.

"You mean there was a reason for that other than wrecking Chadwick's election chances? Not that this is what I'd call a good reason, mind you ..."

"The thought occurs to me," Peggy said, rubbing reflexively at the scar through the fabric, "that there may be rather a _lot_ about the Arena Club investigation you don't know."

"If that's representative of the rest of it, I don't think I want to know."

But he was feeling a little less drained and miserable now.

Peggy smiled and reached for her teacup. "You're allowed to take some time to heal. You can get back in slowly -- or never, if you like. You can do part of the job and let someone else do the other part. As someone once told me," this with a soppily fond smile at Daniel, "sometimes you have to put your faith in others. We all do. You can't always do it all on your own."

"Hey, look, you said it yourself, Jack," Daniel said. "Rose saved our butts. Because Jarvis called her. Because you _told_ Jarvis to call her, and then stalled so Morland didn't just shoot both of us before she got there."

"Yeah, team effort, I get it," Jack grumbled. But he _did_ actually feel better -- good enough to charitably not mention that the whole thing had been kicked off by these two snooping around a party where they weren't supposed to be -- and he had a little more appetite as he picked up the finger sandwich he'd put on his plate. At least until he took a bite. "Are there leaves in this?"

"It's cress," Peggy said. "So what of the Morland investigation, Daniel? We've certainly got enough to put him away, but we also need to get agents searching his estate before he has time to start destroying paperwork."

"I've got Rose on that," Daniel said. "She's never taken lead on an investigation before. You should've seen her face when I handed her the assignment."

Jack munched on sandwiches and let their chatter about the details of the investigation wash over him. There might as well be _some_ advantages to being stuck on a coast opposite his own jurisdiction, and Daniel having to do all the paperwork was one of them.

So maybe action heroes in books didn't have to suffer through the convalescence from hell; maybe they didn't have nightmares and doubt themselves and need a last-minute rescue from a guy tied to a chair. On the other hand, he'd known a few guys in the war who went out there thinking they were Two-Fist Tommy from the pulps and just got their asses shot off, so maybe it'd be a good idea to keep in mind that fictional characters could get their happy ending with a few strokes of the author's typewriter keys. Real bullets left holes that didn't stop bleeding at the turn of a page.

"Did I say thanks for the save?" he asked Daniel during a lull in the conversation. "Because ... thanks."

"Hey, it's always useful to have you owe me a favor."

"I don't think I'm going to finish this," Peggy said, and slipped half a piece of coffee cake onto his plate.

Sam Spade, eat your heart out.


End file.
